Posted
by
samzenpuson Monday September 24, 2012 @05:12PM
from the runaway-part-two dept.

cylonlover writes "Toyota has unveiled a new assistant robot designed to help the disabled live more independently. Called the Human Support Robot (HSR), it represents the latest initiative in Toyota's Partner Robot program and is intended to help out around the home by fetching things, opening curtains, and picking up objects that have fallen to the floor. The HSR can be controlled using a simple graphical user interface via tablet PC. It can also wear a tablet atop its head, which would allow caregivers and family members to communicate with the robot's owner over Skype or other services. But unlike recent telepresence robots including the recently announced iRobot RP-VITA, the HSR has an arm and gripper for doing the simple tasks we often take for granted."

I know about carbon monoxide. But I think you're confusing hybrid cars and hybrid robots. Hybrid cars have a combustion engine and an electric engine, while hybrid robots have a part electronic, part biological brain.

If the robot came with an attached blood pressure cuff, pulse oximeter, and a few other things, it could also be applied to telemedicine. Since getting to the doctor's office is a huge challenge for many disabled folks, this could be a great opportunity. The telemedicine thing has and is currently being done, so this would really just be enhancing the robot with functionality that has already been prototyped, tested, and, in some cases, already deployed.
If we're going to do this, let's go for the gold. Picking things up and enabling better communication is a great start, but becoming an all-around health companion and lifeline would take this to the next level and perhaps help it see uptake outside of robot-loving Japan.

Yeah, good luck then trying to pass the FDA and similar obstacles on your way. Either it could never be advertised for that purpose or hundreds and hundreds of millions if not some billions would have to be spent proving that it's not a curling iron but a robot that can be used for some medical applications.

Telemedicine is already real, though still in its infancy. I'm not aware of any restrictions that say the remote monitoring device -- whether be a scale, blood pressure cuff, pulse oximeter, etc... -- has to be stationary.
In fact, all of the above are strictly measurement devices, and have no diagnostic value in a vacuum. Thus, I think the "not intended to diagnose, cure, prevent any disease" disclaimer applies. I'm not sure this would even fall under the FDA's jurisdiction in that case.
We aren't tal

If some hacker came up with this thing in his garage, I'd cut 'im some slack, but... Toyota doesn't have the engineering knowhow to embed a damn webcam/screen combo, so they duct-tape an iPad to the thing? Really?

I used to think that all those instances of "unintended acceleration" could be chalked up to user error, but after seeing this, I'm not so sure anymore...

We had webcams and LCDs for about a decade before we had a video phone service that actually worked and that (more importantly) was widely adopted. Toyota is far from building these things in the numbers that would justify a special-purpose implementation of a functionality that already works (hardware+software) off the shelf.